Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Typically, a computing device requires a printer driver installed thereon in order to interface with a printing device. The printer driver enables a computing device to convert a document into printable data for a particular printing device. In some scenarios—such as office environments—many different printing devices may be connected to a network, each requiring installation of a different printer driver. In these scenarios, a computing device typically needs to have installed thereon a printer driver for each of the printing devices.
Large office environments, for example, might have dozens—or perhaps hundreds—of printing devices within a network. Installing printer drivers for all printing devices on each user's computing device may take considerable time and effort. When all printer drivers are installed on a computing device, a print dialog may prompt a user to select a desired printing device from the list of all printing devices. Furthermore, a user may primarily print documents from a few printing devices, and thus require installation of only the few corresponding printer drivers; however, if a user wishes to print a document on a different printing device, that user must first install the corresponding driver.
When a guest device enters the network, that device must first install a printer driver prior to printing any documents. Moreover, as manufacturers provide updates to their printer drivers, each computing device typically must install the updated printer driver. Thus, requiring the installation of printer drivers for each device separately may be inefficient and time consuming.